


Never Let Me Go

by Charlynch



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: F/F, fight me, probably a disaster but you know what, zombie apocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-12 01:44:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18436454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charlynch/pseuds/Charlynch
Summary: Even at the end of the world, as man devours man in a wild miasma of wicked brutality, she can’t stop thinking of her.Separated from her girlfriend by a quarantine following an outbreak of a deadly and frightening disease, Becky finds herself picking her way across a landscape fraught with danger in the hopes of finding a sanctuary. Somehow, along the way, she intends to rescue the woman she loves, but the rag tag group of survivors she finds herself saddled with are sometimes more of a nuisance than a help.





	1. Becky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foreverflorabella on Tumblr](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=foreverflorabella+on+Tumblr).



> forgive the short prologue, i’ve never written anything like this before and i’m finding my feet a little. reviews greatly appreciated, even though i often take 900 years to reply to them...
> 
> this is a gift to foreverflorabella on tumblr, the bestest, buffest mail order bride i could ever have dreamed of.

When the world ended, it hadn’t been nuclear. The heavens hadn’t parted to rain down a solar flare that consumed the people of Earth in a single boiling flourish. The rapture hadn’t brought wild tempests and spirited the pious away to a peaceful afterlife. Every man, faithful to faithless, died as an equal. Death hadn’t come in a grand swathe that fell like dusk across the world; death had crept amongst them in coughs and sneezes, and had erupted in blood and spit. Death bore no scythe or black trappings; there was no godhead in the brutality of cannibalism.

Becky Lynch, neither faithful nor faithless, clung to the decaying edifice of the world like a swarm of cockroaches, humming industrious vainglory at being alive in spite of themselves. At the grand, penumbral frontier of a world in a fraught dissolution, casual existence had met its demise. Humanity atrophied, succumbing to mortification as it consumed itself. Life beyond man, however, continued regardless. It would almost have been poetic if it wasn’t so... predictable, Becky thought to herself as she carefully stepped over a body the forest had started to take back. Stringy white mushrooms pushed out through the putrefying flesh, their luminous caps peering from amidst the gore like so many expressionless faces. Asuka would’ve known what those mushrooms were. She wouldn’t have had to pause to vomit like Becky did, either; she’d have rubbed sweet circles down the bare, knotted rope of her spine, stark in her malnourished frame. She’d have swept Becky into her arms and told her one of the stories she’d heard one hundred times over to distract her.

But Asuka wasn’t here.

Becky wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, sidestepping the vomit and continuing to fight her way through the verdure. She paused occasionally to listen, her heartbeat thudding deafeningly in her ears. The sky peered through the canopy indifferently, taking on a soft, warm tinge as the impending sunset began to spill across the heavens in shades of pale fire. The infected were always more active at night, Becky knew, and she didn’t want to be outside to see just how much more active. Setting her jaw, she pushed onward with resolve, trying to make as little noise as possible. Cutting through woodland adjacent to the highway was not, perhaps, the most efficient route, but chances of survival off the main roads increased so dramatically that Becky almost preferred to risk the slow passage and unknown terrain. The main roads were riddled with infected and bandit gangs of survivors looking to steal food and weaponry from anybody unfortunate enough to cross their path. As the inexorable creep of evening trailed at her heels, the glimpses of sky like darkening handprints between the broad green shadow of the chestnut leaves overhead, Becky tried to mentally list off her options. If worst came to worst, she could climb a tree, but then she risked being stuck up there to die; the infected were persistent, and would not leave prey alone once they had identified it. They’d simply wait for exhaustion to let her tumble from the branches into their eager, greying maws, or for sheer stubborn dedication to dying uninfected to starve her to death and let her body fall limply to the ground for them to pick through as vultures wearing the faces of men. Becky didn’t much like that notion, and so as she continued trudging through the leaf litter, she thought of alternatives. She could keep moving, but of course exhaustion loomed large at the crest of every hill, at every shadowy threat on the horizon. Perhaps she’d find a farmhouse she could hide in the attic of, ladders drawn up to prevent any wandering infected stumbling upon her hiding place. Perhaps there’d be a hayloft to afford her a few days of shelter out of the reach of the shambling death that seemed ever present even at the edges of her dreams. As Becky reached the edge of the treeline, she paused, stifling a gasp; of course the trees ended right by the side of the road. Of course the first thing she’d come face to face with was a car that had careened down into the trees, the driver writhing and snapping viciously, trying to get to Becky despite the fact his entire lower body had been crushed by the impact of the crash. Certain the commotion of the trapped infected in the car was sure to draw others of his ilk, Becky moved on, carefully skirting the car and following the road onward to the distant shape of a town in the distance.

 

Asuka peered over the top of her glasses at Becky, furrowing her eyebrows as Becky scrambled across the living room floor on all fours. She was hotly pursued by Pablo, the tiny Pomeranian puppy belonging to their next door neighbour they’d agreed to babysit for the afternoon whilst she was out of town.

“You’re both ridiculous,” Asuka said absently, as Becky made a huge show of allowing the puppy to take her down, his tiny jaws snapping at her hair whilst his ridiculous whisk of a tail wiggled with mad delight.

“We’re cute though,” Becky replied, rolling over onto her back to look at Asuka upside down, grinning at her impishly as the puppy worried at the hem of her shirt. With an almost resigned sigh, Asuka kneeled down beside Becky and dipped to kiss her forehead, though Becky blew a warm sigh at her in response, steaming up her glasses.

“I’m going to go for a nap. All this stuff on the news about people getting sick... It’s just making me anxious. I’m going to sleep it off,” Asuka said, stretching as she got to her feet, before removing her glasses to clean them on her cardigan. Becky nodded, reaching out to give Asuka’s hand an understanding squeeze. As if on cue, the news anchor on TV began to recite the same phrases Becky had been hearing all morning; a “sudden onset” fever that had swept across several provinces of mainland China, crippling the working population and slowing almost all activity to a halt. The theory thus far was some new, highly evolved form of bird flu; nobody had died yet, but the illness seemed to have appeared almost overnight, and some countries were already taking precautions and closing their doors to Chinese visitors. People were coming down with aches and pains, flu like symptoms that rapidly devolved into neuralgia, haemorrhaging, anaemia and a variety of other symptoms Becky did not like the sound of.

“I don’t think this is bird flu,” the sound of Asuka’s voice made Becky jump.

“Hey, don’t think about it, okay? They’ll figure out, they always do. There’s always this big scare about bird flu this and H1N1 that, and then it doesn’t come to anythin’. Go for a nap, you’ll just worry yourself watchin’ the news,” Becky reassured her, swiftly changing the channel. Over on the Food Network, one was regaled with the incessant yelling of Cake Boss, rather than grim and gruesome stories of the infirm and afflicted, and their apparently very contagious maladies. Asuka sighed and nodded.

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said slowly. “But bet your ass, this is more than bird flu. Just... let’s be safe, okay?”

“Babe, we’ll be fine.”

Asuka smiled wanly at Becky and turned to go back to the bedroom. Becky shrugged off her concern. How many times had there been a bird flu scare? Too many to count. And how many times had she had bird flu? Exactly... oh, would you look at that, it was none.

“I’m healthy as a horse,” Becky told Pablo. “And I’m not a bird neither. I reckon we’ll be just fine.”

The little dog cocked his head in response. Outside, it began to rain.


	2. Asuka

“Now remember,” the woman continued, seemingly unaware that Asuka desperately wanted her to leave so she could close the front door and go back to her video game. “Pablo can’t bark because of his throat surgery, so be sure to keep an eye on him to see if he’s trying to let you know he needs outside. We don’t want any accidents.”

Asuka nodded blandly, reaching out to take the struggling Pomeranian from her neighbour, who thankfully complied without much more conversation. Pleasantries exchanged, the woman left Pablo in Asuka’s care and returned to her own apartment. Asuka sighed in relief as she set Pablo down and closed the door, jogging back through to the living room as though afraid her PS4 might have spontaneously combusted in the time she was gone. Pablo followed, nipping at the elastic in her socks playfully, his ridiculous tail wiggling madly. As much as Asuka loved Becky, she rather resented that Becky had volunteered them as caretakers for their across-the-hall neighbour’s dog over the weekend whilst she visited family out of town. Pablo was good enough company, very sweet, and very good at keeping Becky distracted, but Asuka had wanted to make plans of her own for her and Becky. Plans that just so happened to involve a little velvet ring box stashed behind the shelves of video games, conveniently hidden behind titles Asuka knew Becky wouldn’t have any interest in. As Asuka unpaused her game to return to the boss fight she’d spent the last twenty minutes chipping away at, Pablo darted back and forth across the rug, chasing the controller wire.

“I guess with all this panic about the flu, maybe it’s best to stay home,” Asuka told Pablo, who wagged his tail in response. “Can’t catch the flu if we spend our weekend holed up in here with takeout food and Final Fantasy IX.”

As if to punctuate Asuka’s words, a short, sharp series of knocks rang out. Pablo hurried to the door indignantly, huffing in the absence of a bark. He danced around Asuka’s legs as she cracked the door open to see The Neighbour standing with her arms full.

“I forgot to leave this with you with the rest of Pablo’s stuff,” she said apologetically by way of greeting. “It’s a backpack carrier for Pablo. He’s good on the leash so you probably won’t need it, but he loves riding in the carrier on your back and watching the world go by. Anyway, I’ll let you get back to Pablo, thanks again for looking after him!”

With that, The Neighbour was gone, and a dumbfounded Asuka was left standing in her doorway, holding the carrier. The Neighbour in question was named Susan, but Asuka much preferred to mentally relegate her to the ominous title of simply “The Neighbour”. Almost every interaction she had with Asuka was over and done with before Asuka could get a word in edgewise; she wasn’t quite sure how Becky managed to hold a conversation with the woman, but then Becky could hold a conversation in an empty room. She’d always been like that, bright and gregarious whilst Asuka hung back like a shadow, preferring to listen over talk. As she made herself comfortable in front of the TV, the backpack discarded, Pablo on her lap, she felt a profound sense of peace. Perhaps a weekend at home with Becky was exactly what they needed; some time to themselves.She smiled slightly as her phone lit up with a text alert from Becky at the precise moment she landed the killing blow in the boss battle, vowing to check as soon as she reached the next town and could save her game.

The text rippled onscreen for a brief moment, like a reflection on the surface of a pond, before the backlight went out and Becky’s warning disappeared.

_Shit just got real. I’m trying to come home to get you. I don’t like where this is going._

 

The thick pattering of the rain into the containers Asuka had lined the windows with rattled an ominous percussion through the house. Becky had said “I’m trying to come home” forty two days ago. Thirty days ago, they’d lost cell reception. Twelve days ago, Asuka had accepted that Becky wasn’t coming. The “flu”, as it turned out, was a violent and previously unseen illness that science had not had the time to unravel before it gripped much of the world and spread like wildfire. At first, coughs and sneezes, followed by migraines, laid out much of the population. Then violent haemorrhaging; at first, hospitals were full of people bleeding from their eyes and noses and ears, writhing as seizures crashed over them in waves. Eventually, people just chose to die at home; the hospitals couldn’t handle the amount of patients, and research was no further along on even the basest preventative measures. Once the haemorrhaging stage passed, people slipped into comas. This was the stage that had killed the Chinese public’s economic drive; the country was barely functional as people dropped into a twilight existence, with no foreseeable recovery. Sad, brutal, but to an extent, manageable. It wasn’t until people started waking up that the problems started. Asuka had followed it all on the news, then online when the TV broadcasts stopped. Some suburbs, even whole towns were evacuated. People like Asuka, trapped in the inner city, in an infection “hot point”, were sealed in with the quarantine and left to die. Asuka had played enough video games and seen enough zombie movies to manage, thus far, not to die. There were near misses, sure, but she’d stocked up enough at the start of the crisis to keep her and Pablo living comfortably enough that she didn’t need to go wandering the streets and risking the infected to find more supplies. She walked the dog on the apartment building roof, collected rainwater, and had barricaded the hallway and apartment doorway so well she hadn’t seen a single undead, save for those she’d observed on her forays down the fire escape. Sometimes, she’d sit and watch the infected drift the streets aimlessly, strange, groaning figures that seemed almost dormant, waiting for prey. Sound drew them, she’d learned, when she threw a rock at a trash can, and a flurry of them had descended on the source of the noise, shrieking with wild rage when they discovered there was nothing there. Some bleak part of her soul scanned the shambling crowds, wondering if one of the bloodied faces that turned to look up at her blindly if she made too much noise climbing down, would one day be Becky’s.

“Pablo,” Asuka’s voice echoed around the apartment, eerily grey in the morning light, all colour swallowed by the pall of rain clouds that crawled across the horizon. After so many days of not speaking, her voice crackled round the edges like paper catching fire, rasping with disuse. Pablo trotted through dutifully, his little face seeming tired somehow. The apartment building had been breached three days previously, and since then, Pablo had spent his nights pacing at the front door, bristling every time he heard movement out on the stairs beyond Asuka’s barricade.

“We’re gonna have to move on soon,” Asuka told him, crouching to affectionately scratch him behind the ears. The insistent thudding from outside the hallway in the stairwell had only grown more violent as time passed. The drone of military aircrafts overhead had gradually grown further away and less frequent until it seemed to have ceased altogether. Asuka wasn’t sure if this meant the quarantine was unsuccessful, or the opposite.

“Where are you, Becky?” Asuka asked the sky, leaning on the windowsill. Pablo snuffed reassuringly in response. The sky had no answer.

 

Asuka hurriedly ran back and forth between the rooms, stuffing the duffel bag with everything she could think she and Becky would need. Pablo eyed the windowed backpack with apprehension.

“I know you don’t wanna go in there,” Asuka told him as she packed her first aid supplies. “But you’re just gonna have to deal with it.”

Asuka took a breath, looking around the apartment one last time for anything that she might need. The ring box sat open on the kitchen table where Asuka had been playing with it, letting the light catch in the facets of the gems and daydreaming about what might have been if things hadn’t gone so dramatically wrong. With a soft sigh, she snapped the box closed and stowed it in the side pocket of Pablo’s carrier. If Becky was still out there, somewhere, Asuka was going to find her.


End file.
